At one point in Superliminal the moon came to my aid. I was stuck in a room somewhere with no exits. Up above me I could see the moon through an open skylight, so I grabbed it and brought it down to earth. And then…
Superliminal reviewDeveloper: Pillow Castle GamesPublisher: Pillow Castle GamesPlatform: Reviewed on PCAvailability: Out today on PC
I put the moon up front with this because I hate to open with a quote straight off. Anyway, now we’ve had the moon, here’s Nathaniel Hawthorne on dreams. Hawthorne’s ambition was “to write a dream”. He meant: “a dream which shall resemble the real course of a dream, with all its inconsistencies, its eccentricities and aimlessness – with nevertheless a leading idea running through the whole.” Tough gig? Quite. “Up to this old age of the world, no such thing has never been written.”
Superliminal certainly gives it a go. It is not, in truth, particularly dreamlike a lot of the time, but it is set amongst dreams – in a sort of dream laboratory in which you are thoroughly lost. And it pulls a lot of dreamlike tricks. Superliminal is all about perspectives. Let’s say there’s a room with a door halfway up the wall that you really want to get through. You have a little wooden block in your hand. If you can position the block so it big enough to climb upon to get to that door – voila! The block be big enough. Perspective is reality here.
SUPERLIMINAL – E3 KF TEASER Watch on YouTube
It gets a lot more complex than that, of course. Your job is to navigate increasingly fraught environments looking for the exit. At first I worried this was going to be one of those games that follows the comical bureaucratic blandspeak template of Portal, but it’s a lot more interesting and heartfelt than that. At first I worried, like I mentioned, that it wasn’t particularly dreamlike – that Hawthorne was right and the subject was just too tough. But it’s a mediated dream, I guess – a lab dream. Almost a guided dream. More than anything it’s just a wonderful puzzle game.